Post Tisha B'Av Reflections 2013

#1:
I’ve noticed that when I’m sick or when I’m fasting there is a certain calm clarity that comes over me. My energy level is very low and I expend it only sparingly. It is suddenly clear to me what matters and what doesn’t. The emails can wait. It is right to just sit with my children and watch them eat. Only simple things are really necessary in life. I walk slowly and notice the flowers. It is like the world has suddenly become slow motion. I pray to take this perspective with me into my normal energetic detail-filled life.

#2:
Why fast and mourn on Tisha B’av? Why have Tisha B’av at all? Why not just focus on the light, on the joyous side of life – the Purims and the Hanukkahs? Because this, too, this deep sadness that is a part of our history, this heritage of suffering and pain, this, too is a part of God’s world. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Shma statement, and how we say all the time (twice a day) that God is one. What does it mean to be one? It’s all His. You can’t only want the good moods and the laughs. You have to somehow learn to embrace the crying. Not just to survive it. My oldest son Medad fasted the whole day for the first time this year, and that last hour, he said something about how he just wanted it to go fast, to get through it. I understood, but at the same time, I wondered – Shouldn’t we somehow embrace this, too? There is no hour in our lives that is not a part of God’s history, our precious gift. In one of the Tisha B’av kinot, lamentations, alternating lines end with Betzeti Mimitzrayim and Betzeti Miyerushalayim, “When I left Egypt,” and “When I left Jerusalem.” The one was a joyous leaving, the other a sad one, and the poet juxtaposes them to show the contrast, but at the same time, one gets a sense of the similarity, even in the way the two phrases sound. Tisha B’av comes to remind us to embrace all of our history and all of our lives, the ups, the downs, the joys and the irritations. Somehow they are all one.